But for me, psychologically... I want to do the right thing, but I also want to be surrounded by people who do the right thing. When people around me don't do the right thing, it feels futile when I try to do it, so I gradually give up. What is the difference? If you would give me a choice of living in two otherwise equivalent cities, only one city completely vegan, I would choose the vegan city, even if I knew the other city is available. I just don't want to have the temptation right in front of my eyes. Similarly, I would rather work in a company where everyone tries their best, than in a company where people choose the easiest way; it's just difficult to try doing my best when I keep seeing people who choose the easiest way, especially if once in a while their laziness makes my own work harder.
I think you've touched on something important here that I also touched on at the end of my comment above; namely, that in practice, it is often more effective to invest resources in taking preemptive steps to avoid moral dilemmas than it is to prepare for, or expect to be satisfied with your behavior in, actual moral dilemmas.
it is often more effective to invest resources in taking preemptive steps to avoid moral dilemmas than it is to prepare for, or expect to be satisfied with your behavior in, actual moral dilemmas.
Such as to build some safety mechanism in trolleys? :D
Also, Bible says "do not bring us into temptation" instead of "help us overcome temptation".
[CW: This post talks about personal experience of moral dilemmas. I can see how some people might be distressed by thinking about this.]
Have you ever had to decide between pushing a fat person onto some train tracks or letting five other people get hit by a train? Maybe you have a more exciting commute than I do, but for me it's just never come up.
In spite of this, I'm unusually prepared for a trolley problem, in a way I'm not prepared for, say, being offered a high-paying job at an unquantifiably-evil company. Similarly, if a friend asked me to lie to another friend about something important to them, I probably wouldn't carry out a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. It seems that I'm happy to adopt consequentialist policy, but when it comes to personal quandaries where I have to decide for myself, I start asking myself about what sort of person this decision makes me. What's more, I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad heuristic in a social context.
It's also noteworthy (to me, at least) that I rarely experience moral dilemmas. They just don't happen all that often. I like to think I have a reasonably coherent moral framework, but do I really need one? Do I just lead a very morally-inert life? Or have abstruse thought experiments in moral philosophy equipped me with broader principles under which would-be moral dilemmas are resolved before they reach my conscious deliberation?
To make sure I'm not giving too much weight to my own experiences, I thought I'd put a few questions to a wider audience:
- What kind of moral dilemmas do you actually encounter?
- Do you have any thoughts on how much moral judgement you have to exercise in your daily life? Do you think this is a typical amount?
- Do you have any examples of pedestrian moral dilemmas to which you've applied abstract moral reasoning? How did that work out?
- Do you have any examples of personal moral dilemmas on a Trolley Problem scale that nonetheless happened?
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